


Hope

by JoRaskoph



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Changing POVs, Changing Tenses, Community: HPFT, F/M, Fear, Gift Fic, Hope comes effortlessly when you still have the worst ahead of you, Infertility, Longing, Miscarriage, One-Shot, There are problems not even magic can cure, hopeful!Neville, prompt: Hannah/Neville difficulties getting pregnant, rebelious hope, resigned hope, this was what happened to people who won a war at seventeen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7548994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoRaskoph/pseuds/JoRaskoph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through all of it, through the fear, the devastation, you held onto your hope, nurtured it lovingly like you would have the baby you longed for. * To Hannah Longbottom, happiness doesn’t come naturally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paulatheprokaryote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paulatheprokaryote/gifts).



 

 

_The door closes softly behind her and while it drowns out the voices, the bleeping, the sobs, murmurs, it can’t keep the fear away. The fear has become her constant companion. Hannah closes her eyes to try and keep the tears back, but it is futile, as she knew it would be.The tears are another thing she has learned to anticipate—accept—,not lovingly but at least with a sort of resignation. The fear won’t go away, the tears won’t go away—not for another four weeks. Four weeks, she hopes, pleads, bargains. Four weeks, she has promised herself, four weeks she will manage._

_Hope._

_With tears streaming down her cheeks Hannah laughs bitterly at the word. It strikes her as ironic, how she’s been told so many times to never give up hope. Don’t give up, you can do this, just do another cycle, another potion, another method. At first it had been easy enough. The first negative test result? It’s only our first try, let’s not give up hope, you’ll see, we’ll just try again. Hope is easy when trying is fun and the disappointments have been few. Then another test, and another …_

 

Hope is harder when you’ve known false hope. The first positive result, the monitoring spells, the pictures, … A nursery painted red, gold and yellow (no black, they had both agreed on that), a stroller, and so so many tiny socks. Hope comes effortlessly when you still have the worst ahead of you.

 

But hope is harder to hold onto, when you floo into St. Mungo’s at four in the morning, wearing only your morning robe, with blood running down your thighs and you shake so hard you drop the quill filling out your forms at the reception desk.

 

One moment hope is there and you feel it stirring inside you and then, the next moment—

 

Nothing.

 

Hannah has learned that fear or anger or resignation are not the opposite of hope, as one might assume—all of these can co-exist at the same time.

 

Like when the Healer had told them her uterus was a difficult one, that pregnancy was extremely unlikely and would in every case be difficult. The way Neville had held her hand when she shook her head at the Healer, still unable to grasp what they were telling her, he had already accepted it. Where she was shocked, he was calm and collected, resigned to the fact and the hand at her back was a soft and gentle pressure, was an unsaid “I love you“ and “I believe in us“ and “We’ll still try“.

 

The potions, the treatments, the nights spent in hospital to do yet more tests; all the things they did with a weak smile and cautious light in their eyes, with hopes of managing what even magic could not do. Resignation coexists well with hope.

 

But it changes the way hope feels. It changes, from exhilarating to comforting, from excited to comfortable. When you check out the same Muggle pregnancy test from the same cashier yet again, because you don’t want to bother the Healers anymore, the encouraging smile they give you stirs a different hope, a familiar, softer one. It’s a patient feeling, this new hope, it lends warmth to your tired answering smile and almost makes you believe the words you tell yourself on your way home. It probably didn’t work, most likely it didn’t, and I’m okay with that. We’ll just try again, if it didn’t work this time… And there are so many this times.

 

The resigned hope is the most enduring one. Rebellious hope, on the other hand, is a very different matter.

 

It surfaces when you realise your father has not been listening while you told him about the new potion your Healer was talking about. The many times you have to remind your friend you can’t have cocktails, you are trying for a baby, because she keeps forgetting … Rebellious hope arises when the people around you have given up on hope.

 

And for a time it feels as if the hope they have given up on is actually added to your own, for a while it gives you the strength to look them in the eye and smile at them (while a malicious voice in your head tells you to punch them instead). The rebellious hope is a burning thing, much more alive than even that first, innocent hope. But just as bright as it burns, as much does it destroy, and it leaves you blinded in a twilight of doubt.

 

While the rebellious hope has given you the bravery to confront that nasty witch in Diagon Alley who claimed infertility only affected those unfit to raise children, it is also what leaves you lying lifelessly on your sofa for days afterwards, wondering if maybe she was right after all.

 

_The door opens behind Hannah. Caught crying in a bathroom, she very faintly wishes this was less of a recurrent situation in her life. But you get used to everything and she just turns a little more into the wall, doing what she can to quiet her sobs. The strangled noise echoes far too loudly in the enclosed space and the harder she tries to calm down the harder she shakes, the more her desperation overpowers her. The other person moves awkwardly, as if they are worried about Hannah’s mental stability and she can’t even blame them; she is crying uncontrollably in a bathroom after all. In the mirror, she catches glimpses of a swollen red face, tears and snot shining in the too bright lights. She wishes her crying face would be less familiar. When the other person closes the door to a stall, she grabs a handful of paper towels to blow her runny nose, dry her face, try and regain some sort of order, if not control._

_On their way back outside, the stranger gives her a sympathetic look, murmurs “chin up, it’ll get better”, and the well-meant gesture only makes Hannah well up again because this is simply not fair._

 

Through all of it, through the fear, the devastation, you hold on to your hope, nurture it lovingly like you would the baby you long for so desperately. And now, when your resilience is finally rewarded, after all the times you stayed strong, didn’t give up hope, this was supposed to be the better you were hoping for.

 

This is what you always imagined, when you sat on the tiles of your bathroom floor, holding tight onto a piece of plastic that would determine your future. You used to imagine a pale pink line appearing before your eyes; used to hope for this portal that could grant access into another world that had been hidden from you before. You used to imagine a look of pure joy in his eyes and an incredible lightness in your heart when _finally_ you would have accomplished the impossible. Better was supposed to happen for you when that pink line appeared.

 

Instead came the fear. You stared at a pink line where none had been before, and fear consumed you completely, drowning out every other emotion. The fear was cold on your neck when you rushed to leave the flat so you would be gone when he returned. It was pressing from all sides, so urgently you felt your limbs go numb as you half ran, half stumbled over the sidewalk. You were bumping into strangers left and right, your world suddenly moved in slow motion while theirs seemed unchanged. You couldn’t resist the urge to move your hand over your flat belly whenever one of them jostled you, unbelieving still, but already protective.

 

Even when your Healer mumbled the spells, rubbing your hand soothingly all the while, your fear was right there, in an uncomfortable lump right below your throat. It was gagging you, rendering you silent from trying too hard to reign it in, keep it inside of you, tightly controlled so it would not accidentally take over.

 

“I understand you are scared, but you needn’t be. This pregnancy is a blessing—just enjoy it”, the Healer had said. But as a Healer, so very concerned with her mental health and well-being, what else could they have said?

 

Try as she might, Hannah found it impossible to believe them. Found it impossible to just accept this incredible fortune she had learned did not come naturally to her. When the Healer sent her home, unconcerned and even congratulated her, she could not shake the distinct feeling that something had to be wrong; this had to be a misunderstanding, a ploy to lull her into a false feeling of security.

 

When she told Neville, she watched very carefully, studied his features, waiting for a reaction that would show he understood, like he had understood her every step of the way. Then his eyes lit up, just like she had imagined back then, and her heart did not feel any lighter. His hopefulness felt almost like betrayal. All his sappy smiles, his talk of a tiny toy broom, of Christmases, hot chocolate with peppermint and marshmallows, of family vacations and first rides on the Hogwarts Express it all seemed so wrong to her. It put a distance between them she had never known before.

 

For his sake she forced a smile, swallowed the fear that was still sitting tight in her throat. She let him talk on and on and all his “I told you”s, his “I love it so much already”s, his “we’ll be so happy”s made her feel a little weaker. Before, they had been a team, a union—he had been the only person with whom she always felt she could be a hundred per cent herself. After the miscarriage he had been her rock, the only one who understood that losing a baby who was too small to live didn’t feel any less painful than losing one that wasn’t. He had been the one who—after months, after a year of mourning, even—had told her it was okay to still be heartbroken. A heart did not suffer the loss of a child without being permanently scarred, he’d said, and that the baby whose name they hadn’t gotten to choose would always be theirs, always loved, always missed.

 

Now he was lost to her too, just like Susan who had said “You worry too much, this happens all the time“, missing the whole point of this precisely not happening to her all the time, not even sometimes but only once and that one time ending not at all happily.

 

But she loved him all the same and the love added another burden to the fear she was already carrying, the burden of his happiness which she could not bring herself to share.

 

The pregnancy had been supposed to be their better, was supposed to be what they were working towards, but to her it became a constant worry, a never-ending task. It was a stream of precautions to take: eat healthy, take your potions, make sure you exercise enough, don’t exercise too much, don’t lift too heavily, don’t expose your baby to too much noise, too much excitement, don’t travel publicly—someone could shove you, don’t floo—you could fall on arrival, don’t … and you had expected that, had even been looking forward to it.

 

But to the endless list of practical rules the fear adds an even longer list of obsessive worries: Set your alarm for 5:59 or 6:11, just not a number with a zero in it—you know what zero means—nothingness, emptiness, blood and death… or maybe it doesn’t but just to be sure you don’t set your alarm to a time with a zero in it. You want this to work out, you want it so much you feel a little sick from from the overwhelming desire that is coursing through you.

 

And because you want it so much, you follow the fear’s orders, every one of them. You don’t leave your bed on the tenth, twentieth and thirtieth of each month, don’t wear black or white clothing, or red… You brush your teeth with a pink toothbrush—because pink was the line that offered life and don’t you want life? In a frantic fury you banish every single feminine hygiene product from your flat—you won’t need them, you swear, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t!

 

When you were just trying for a baby, at least you had been able to live too, had been able to enjoy the little things. You had exchanged little smiles with your lover and felt warmth flooding your body at your wordless understanding. In short stolen fearless moments you had envisioned the life you were working towards, had imagined a fluffy head of fine baby hair, the smell of it, the feel of it in your arms, had imagined tiny fingers holding onto you and an adorable smile that turned your heart into jelly.

 

Now all these things you used to take comfort in are soured by fear.

 

While Neville squealed in excitement at the news of first movements in her belly, Hannah sat with the fear weighing down on her even more heavily, monitoring every tiny flutter and fretting in the pauses between.

 

She might even have been able to handle the fear, might have been able to live with the constant worry, with feeling the cold echo of blood long shed tickling down the insides of her thighs. She might have been able to live with waking up at night, covered in sweat, the fear overheating her from inside where it was burning, her hands instantly darting to her only slightly rounded belly to make sure it had not all been a dream.

 

She might have been able to handle it all, if the fear had remained a possibility in her mind.

 

_Recovering from another bout of tears, Hannah leans her forehead against the cold tiles. Life is hard, she had—they  all—had learned early, earlier than a lot of others. But no matter how hard it was, she had always believed her life would be full and happy. She had been so sure that_ that _life had to be somewhere, waiting for her, if only she looked hard enough, tried hard enough. This was what happened to people who won a war at seventeen—they started thinking they could will everything they wanted into existance. She had been so naive to hope for a happy ever after. Now she has learned, now she knows that life is hard and your wishes are dangerous._

  
When the Floo roared to life on a Tuesday afternoon during her twenty-second week, Hannah instantly knew something was horribly wrong.

 

As she heard the crackling of the flames, her heart sank instantly and she felt an impossible coldness spread in her chest. Their friends usually didn’t use the floo except for planned visits—growing up in a war they had all learned to appreciate the luxury of messages unimportant enough to send by owl.

 

Having felt her jump beside him, Neville absentmindedly reached for her hand, as had become his habit, and murmured soothingly “It’s okay, don’t worry, it’s probably my Gran she–”

 

But his meaningless reassurances were interrupted by the businesslike voice sounding imperiously from the living room: “Ms. Longbottom, it’s Healer Nott here from the gynaecology ward. The monitoring spells on you are showing some irregularities—may I come through?”

 

Neville’s mouth was still hanging open, the words it was forming forgotten and Hannah could swear she was hearing the shaking of her hands in the tremble of her voice as she called for the professional to enter, not even daring to move to greet him by the fireplace.

 

Healer Nott was a tall dark man with gentle hands and a soothing voice, trained to talk to people who were scared stiff like her. Hannah heard that he was talking to her all the time while he carefully examined her, telling her exactly what he was checking and why, but all she registered was that Neville, who was listening with rapt attention, was slowly closing his mouth again.

 

The calm, collected voice told her a lot of whys and hows and what nows. It told her about options and treatments, methods and probabilities. It told her about numbers and weeks, potions, weights, functions. It kept talking while the gentle hands, which were far too soft and far too pale were carefully helping her on a stretcher floating above her living room table. She registered that the voice never faded and how Neville did not let go of her hand, but all she could do was feel for the gentle nudge in her belly, waiting, wishing, hoping still.

 

She finds she’s starting to resent that hope.

 

Had she given up after those first few negative test results, there would not be a tiny grave in the back of their garden. Had she allowed herself to let go of this improbable hope, she might be at a beach right now, enjoying the sun and some cocktails with Neville by her side. Had she not held on to that insane hope, they might be feeling complete now, might be feeling happy.

 

Instead they were entering their magically enlarged fireplace together, him holding onto her hand tightly, trying to catch her eye and waiting for the reassurance she could give him with only a small gesture, only a smile. Under his watchful eye she was frantically feeling for a glimmer of that hope he wanted so urgently from her, felt for a life that might still be somewhere inside of her.

 

He was looking at her for hope while her head was hanging from the impossibly tilted stretcher, her feet suspended above her in a desperate attempt to preserve hope for a little longer. It was then she realised he might not have been that far away from her to begin with. The fear she saw burning in his eyes now looked a lot like the one she had felt every day and maybe he had just been doing his best to preserve their hope too. Maybe his stories about little shoes and laughter, his insistence on the future they had been _willing_ to happen all this time was the same as her superstitions, her obsession with avoiding zeros. Maybe they had both been doing all they could to keep the hope alive and now all she could do was to keep feeling for the movement she knew might not come.

 

She understood now. She gripped his hand a little more tightly and hoped he knew.

 

Upon their arrival at St. Mungo’s they were greeted by an excited host of Healers all busily casting charms and spells, monitoring, and treating, working on her like she was a piece of wood instead of a living and breathing human. Her clothes were vanished and the amount of eyes directed at her most private parts of anatomy should have made her uncomfortable… but, just like all of them, she was too focused on her inside to care.

 

A deep sigh escaped her when she felt the tiny, tiny movement she had been waiting for, and for a second or so all the eyes that were focused on her moved up to her face to check if she had said something. Then all but one pair moved away again and she silently squeezed Neville’s hand to let him know it was okay. She received a gentle squeeze in return as he saw her smile; there was still hope.

 

After the initial shock subsided the words start slowly sinking in. Cervical insufficiency they said, minimal chance of survival, Trendelenburg, … and all you understand is your baby is in danger because your body doesn't work as it should. The baby is still alive, there is still hope, but if your body fails now, the baby will almost certainly die.

 

And you can do nothing to prevent it, you can not do a single thing. Even the false security of the alarm tick is void now you don’t get to get up in the mornings anymore.

 

The only thing you do is lie here and you study yourself losing your sanity bit by bit, going even more mental than you had been already. Hope becomes elusive as the seconds tick by ever so slowly and the vast expanse of time left in this nightmare stretches endlessly before you. What is a second, a minute, and hour even, of time you manage to get through when viability is still a month away? Your hope is not so much a feeling anymore, but rather the ghost of a feeling. It is still there, but only barely, lingering, transparent, neither here nor there, at danger of disappearing any second. And there are so many more seconds.

 

Time stretches when the things you see all day are restricted by the movement of your head from left to right. At one side there is the door, a plain white hospital door with a plump green handle. It was built to function rather than to please the eye and you wonder if whoever made it would have designed it more interestingly if they had been forced to look at it for an extended period of time while spending their days lying upside down.

 

In the hours and days you spend contemplating the door, its ugly handle and plain frame, you curse the person who made it countless times, but the majority of the time you worry.

 

You worry about the baby, about its chances of survival which have improved only minimally in the days you have been lying here. In your darker moments you also worry about the life it would lead and wonder whether it would suffer if it had a mother who lost her shit lying upside down on a bed for longer than is advisable. You reprimand yourself for thinking like that, but in your darkest moments you find the thought almost entertaining. Your child would have a mother who turned insane trying to protect it, just like its daddy’s did. Maybe this kind of thing runs in the family…

 

When you can’t suffer your macabre thoughts any longer, you turn your head to the other side, where you look at your bedside table. It was decorated by Neville, who tries to improve your time here by bringing you bits and bobs from home. There’s a framed photo of the two of you, an assortment of souvenirs from your travels and naturally a potted plant that waves at you with its tentacle-like branches. It has healing abilities, Neville tells you. The loving effort he put into these decorations moves you, but you can only enjoy this comfort for a while before your love for your husband reminds you of how desperately you want your shared dream to come true. And with the thought of your hopes, the fear returns, a crushing wave that feels more and more unbearable every time.

 

On this side you can also see the window if you lift your head a little, but you were told not to do that, and it faces a wall anyway. So you can only look at your table, at your past and present laid out in front of you and sometimes you wonder how you are supposed to keep living with Neville if this pregnancy fails too. You have never come this far and if this ends you probably never will again. How could you look at him every day? You know you couldn’t stand his hopeful smiles anymore, but neither could you stand being the one who took them from him.

 

You usually turn back to the bland door soon.

 

Hope, Hannah finds, can be a curse.

 

_Escaping insanity on a day to day basis, Hannah manages to get through seventeen days of this, allowing the pregnancy to progress to its twenty-fourth week. The Healers are now cautiously optimistic, as that gives the baby a slightly above fifty per cent chance of survival. They allow her to get up twice a day to go to the toilet and brush her teeth. The option absolutely terrifies her, as fifty-five is still forty-five away from what she wants for her baby. But after weeks of lying around, it is impossible to deny how much she craves these little excursions, the chance to stretch her legs and move around, if only a little._

 

And so, you walk. It’s an impossible task because after the many days you’ve been told not to move, you feel like you could be breaking your baby with every step you take. The bathroom in the hall is about twenty steps away and you hold on to the railings on the wall for every one of them as if you were already old and frail. Instead you feel giant, massive with the new weight you gained while you were lying down. The center of you seems moved somehow, your body out of proportion as if your belly were already full to bursting. In reality it is only slightly bigger than what would comfortably fit your saggy hang-around-at-home clothes. But you never got a chance to get used to it and so you wobble your way to the bathroom, eagerly looking around, noting the little changes on the ward, the new names to the rooms, fresh flowers on the desk, a young Healer you haven’t seen before…

 

Your head is actually above your neck on these occasions and it feels strange and wonderful. Your little walks are the only time you get even a minimal amount of independence in this hospital and you feel deeply guilty for the amount of joy they give you. How can you be happy about something that puts your baby in danger? The Healers tell you it is not like that. Neville tells you it’s not like that. But what do they know? It is not their bodies that are betraying them.

  
By the time you reach the bathroom door, emotions are crashing over your head and it is all you can do to close the door behind you. While it drowns out the voices, the bleeping, the sobs, murmurs, it can’t keep the fear away.

**Author's Note:**

> for paulatheprokaryote: Dearest Paula, please forgive me, this turned a lot angstier than I had planned with all that’s been happening these last weeks. I might have digressed a little form your prompt, but I think it’s turned out in a way I quite like and that’s fitting :)
> 
> Credits for excellent beta reading go to merlinsbeard and Epikoinos, thank you both so much for you help with this story. Without you it would not be what it is.


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